Reading/Writing

So many great things to keep track of when reading a good book!

 

Finding ideas we can use on our own zines while looking at a Zoo magazine.  Such great ideas!

We are having a great time meeting about our books!  There is a lot of great conversations happening around the room and they are SO INVESTED in meeting with one another.  The strategies we are learning can and should be used at home too!  Sticky notes don’t have to be written, but the concept can still be talked about – especially when reading a book out loud together.  “This is something I’d write on a sticky note at school because I’d want to remember to talk about it when I met about the book…” or “This reminds me of another book we read!  Here’s why…”  

We are doing a lot of work on our writing too.  Kids continue to work on their ZINES about the government (5^th) or an animal (4^th).  We are learning note taking strategies, and have now move on to putting our notes/thoughts into a Google doc that will be shared with me.  Writing a ZINE is meant to open the door for them to continue writing zines after we finish this one.  We will have all of the material for kids to continue to write them available in the room too. 

Using ZOO magazines to help us see what OUR work could look like and include was SUPER FUN!  They learned a LOT and I’m eager to see what they do with their zines!  They shared what they saw with one another and we learned some great facts about animals too.  J   Did you know that the heart of a whale is as big as a grown man!?  Me either.

Math

Partial Products!  Try it!

5th graders can do these things at home to help them with unit 4.

This is an easy game for 5th graders to play at home!

5th graders are working with thousandths.  Look how small they are!

4th graders can do these things at home to help them with unit 4.

4^th graders are working on new multiplication strategies – including PARTIAL PRODUCTS.  This strategy seems odd.  I get that.  But, it’s actually a wonderful way for kids to understand the complete process of multiplication.  Please help your kids with this strategy.  They will use traditional strategies in 5^th grade, but in order to understand HOW to do it, they really need to understand the actual process.  Thank you. 

5^th graders are working on decimals and using coordinate pairs.  We talk about decimals a lot when it comes to money, but when we add THOUSANDTHS, it makes things a bit more difficult.  Despite the fact that we don’t break our money up into thousandths, we can still use the concept of money to identify the size of a decimal. 

I have included some things you can do at home to help with understanding concepts within Unit 4.